How to play Hero with children?

[Steve]

I've been eyeing game systems I could play with my 6-year old, and another thread on this garnered many helpful suggestions.

 

That said, would it be possible to use a simpler form of Hero to play with a child as young as she is? How far could I strip it down to ease teaching her the system?

[TheQuestionMan]

1. Start with the Hero System Sidekick.  
2. Build the Character for her Based on What she want to play.  
3. Danger Room sequences. (Based on her favorite stories).  
4. Give her an example of what a GM/PC is doing and then Ask her to describe her PC is doing. 
5. Play fast and loose with the rules. 

Cheers 

 

QM 

[Ndreare]

Keep the dice low.

My 5 year old can handle up to 3 dice after that she starts getting frustrated.

We do simplified gaming to reinforce her mash and reading. It works great because she does not know she is learning addition and subtraction. And she picks up on sight words by having to look for the power name.

[bigbywolfe]

If you are running super heroes just use normal damage, if you are running fantasy just use killing damage or convert to normal damage.  Either way just have her only have to figure one value per dice roll.  Try to keep the number of dice low like Ndreare said.

[Steve]

Supers might be best. She hates even the thought of blood, so killing attacks don't seem like good ideas. Maybe when she's older, I could do a fantasy setting with goblins or lightweight monsters. She plays an online rpg for kids called Pirate101 and another called Wizard101, and maybe I could use one of them for a setting.

 

I will have to bust out my copy of PS238 and see if I can simplify it even more. I wonder, at what point will I reach the "essential salts" of Hero as I simplify the system down for her?

[bigbywolfe]

You can also make finding what DCV you hit easier for her by adding 11 to her OCV and noting it as a skill.  So an OCV 5 is noted as OCV 16-, and when she rolls she knows she is trying to roll under 16 and tells you how many under she got.  It breaks down if you have 1/2 OCV situations, but since you are simplifying things it should work most of the time.

[Lucius]

You'll probably find the essential salt next to the essential pepper.

 

There's no law that says fantasy HAS to be Killing Attacks. I'm sure you could do Pirate 101 and Wizard 101 with Normal Damage.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary goes prospecting for an essential oil well

[Ninja-Bear]

As to the dice amount. My kids can only roll a few at time but still enjoy rolling 10D6! For actions, I suggest two to three action if they cant think of anything. I too started with supers. First scenerio with my daughter, she stopped a loose lion in the park.

[Ninja-Bear]

For inspiration for the style of game I play is Spiderman and his Amazing friends!

[Boll Weevil]

For the baddies, you can't go wrong with robots. This allows your kids' characters to use their best Powers and weapons and still keep the violence mostly G-rated. 

[Steve]

Robots are a good idea.

[dmjalund]

or Automatons if you are in a fantasy world

[bluesguy]

I would definitely do the Superhero style game.  When we play Champions (we mostly play Fantasy Hero), one of the adult's 9 year old son joins in.  I built a Captain America look-alike for him.  I scaled him back.  He is built on less points than everyone else's characters.  I make sure there are some opponents that are clearly the ones he should go after and turn him loose.  He has gotten pretty good at counting up his damage and figuring out what DCV he hit after he rolls his to-hit roll. 

 

We have him sit next to my son, the 19 yr old rules lawyer who has been pretty good at teaching the 9 yr old how to play.

[rravenwood]

I ran a couple "fight the robots" combats for my young kids, and tried to keep it very simple.  I wrote out a few stats for each to reference, such as CV (no need to differentiate between OCV & DCV for this early exposure), DEF (same thought re: PD/ED), MOVE (in inches - we played on a hex mat with Lego figures), dice of damage done (Normal damage), STUN, BODY, REC, and CON.  I think that was it.  I told them they could attack either hand-to-hand or at range, but the ranged attack did 1 less die of damage (to give them a reason beyond RMod to want to try HTH combat).  The robot opponents had only HTH attacks.  Not defining DEX or SPD, I assumed everyone had the same SPD (either 2 or 3, I don't remember which), and let the kids act first (going clockwise around the table like most board games).  I just ticked off phases on scratch paper and let them know when it was time for their "free recovery".  The robots, of course, never recovered, so that was easy to manage.

 

They handled it pretty well, and even figured out counting BODY pretty quickly.  The kindergardener certainly needed help with the math, but the older kids were just fine.  Not having played or run in a looooooong time, I misjudged the toughness of the robots, but the kids still - barely - prevailed.

 

I could see simplifying it even further, ignoring DEF, STUN, BODY, CON and REC, and instead just focussing on the Attack Roll mechanic, having the kids just track the number of hits they take (maybe with an Attack Roll being made by half counting as two hits or something) - once they reach whatever the determined threshold of hits is, they have to recover on their next action but after that are back in action.

 

Lots of possibilities, but I think focussing on a very small number of game mechanics at first is best, and then introducing new rules slowly over time.

[Ninja-Bear]

One thing I ignored was END. No need to track it at all. Since I usually only had 1 or 2 players, I keep speed around 6 for pcs and 2-3 for thugs and 5 for villians.

[rjcurrie]

Find a more mature group to play with.

 

Oh, you mean actual children -- never mind. 

[MuensterCheese]

I will be playing my first Hero adventure tonight with my two 11-year-olds and two of their friends.  I created 250-point characters for each of them.  All four of them decided to let my 5-year-old daughter join, and I didn't even ask them to let her in.  Here is what I took out of the game, and why:

1. Everything mental (OMCV, DMCV)  With fewer points to spread, I didn't want them to create a super-cool good guy only to be defeated by a weak mentalist taking over their minds.  This should also lead to friendship since no one will be pitted against another by means of a controlling mind.
2. CON and END, so there's less to keep track of.  They will already be tracking STUN with damage and REC and I figured that was enough.
3. BODY, RKA, Resistant Defense, Armor Piercing, etc. so there's no bleeding, cutting, stabbing, shooting, dismemberment, beheading, and the like.  We will keep this game like an old-school Spiderman comic book.  And bad guys' guns will always miss.  However, we will still have knockback because it's cool.  I've trained the kids how to count BODY on a STUN roll, which is useful for knockback, robots, and inanimate objects.
4. Multi-power and VPPP, because they're too confusing, even for me.
5. EGO and PRE, because they're hard to role-play for youngsters
6. Ffeet instead of meters, because we live in the U.S. and the kids are used to feet.  I have a printed Excel spreadsheet which shows a bunch of pre-loaded converted numbers so we can go between multiples of 5 meters and feet.

By the way, knocking out all this stuff for kids' sake also makes supplements harder to use since several stats won't apply and that takes away from the total cost of pre-generated and pre-made characters like Arrowhead.  It's made me go back and forth on whether to even purchase stuff like the Powers book or the 3 Villains books.

 

We'll see what happens tonight, when they fight Arrowhead from Champions Complete.

[Ninja-Bear]

I wonder if that is the same Arrowhead as from Enemies II ?

[Xavier Onassiss]

I find playing Hero with children just isn't practical at all. It takes a really, really big hex grid (even for very small children) and unless they're familiar with the rules you have to tell them how and when to move every bloody phase, then they don't want to hold still. Phase 12 is just total chaos. None of them want to be villains, and anyway, have you ever seen a kid who even looks remotely like Ankylosaur? Never mind the whole "Five minute potty break for Doctor Destroyer" fiasco....

 

Miniatures are way better.

[bigdamnhero]

I've run several PS238 games for kids. Like others have already said: simplify, simplify, simplify.

1. Drop the Speed chart.
2. Instead of going in DEX order, it's usually easier to just go around the table and say "What do you do?"
3. Don't sweat End or Charges.
4. Definitely Normal attacks only. In fact, I'd suggest ignoring Body damage altogether, especially for a supers game.
5. Make PD & ED the same, so you can just list one "Defense" stat. If you're ignoring Body, you don' even have to differentiate between Resistant and Nonresistant.
6. Give them 3-5 different attacks at most - enough to give them some variety, but not enough to cause decision paralysis.
7. For each attack, write on the character sheet their Attack Roll (ie OCV+11+any Mods), relevant CSLs, DCV, and Damage dice so they've got everything in one place. OK, I actually do that for grownup game too...
8. Keep their Skills List short & simple, and combine skills wherever you can, ie - combining Acrobat & Breakfall is much easier than explaining the difference between them.
9. Avoid abbreviations wherever possible.
10. Expect that you'll wind up doing most of the heavy Rules Work & math yourself, especially at first.
11. Obviously keep the scenario simple, but don't be surprised when That One Kid comes up with something annoyingly clever.
12. In my experience, 2 hours is about all the attention span you're going to get.
13. Take extra Patience Pills beforehand.

Teh Bunneh & I have actually talked about converting our kids games to use the Champions LARP rules - not running an actual LARP, but using the LARP rules for a tabletop game. But so far we haven't gotten further than talking about it.